


Solastalgia (Or: The Strong Scent of Evergreen)

by Kanthia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aggressively Canadian, Gen, Swearing, shameless self-insert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 11:39:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4605324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers crash-lands in a lake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solastalgia (Or: The Strong Scent of Evergreen)

**Author's Note:**

> _solastalgia: coined by Australian philosopher and researcher Glenn Albrecht of the roots sōlācium (comfort) and algia (pain). A form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment is changed._

Long weekends don’t come nearly often enough, and holidays are always in short supply. She’d managed to scrape together enough days off to make a five-day solo trip in Algonquin Provincial Park off the August long weekend: stick her canoe in the south end of Canoe Lake bright and early Thursday morning, make it to Burnt Island Lake by sunset. Big Trout Lake the next day, meandering up the Otterslide River. It was a push trip, but she liked pushing herself. In a world where you couldn’t change the channel without learning about space-robots dropping cities on people, it was nice to know that a regular Jane -- well, not Nobel-prize-winning Jane Foster publishing her thesis on the theory of simultaneity (suck it, Einstein!) based on research she’d done on Asgard, but the more regular kind of regular Jane -- could still carry her own canoe if she wanted to. And damn she wanted to. She’d been tripping since she was thirteen and it was still her favourite way to get away from people, declutter her mind a little.

So of course it’s on her second evening, just setting up site on this pretty little island campsite in the north end of Big Trout, when there is this horrible screeching sound and a fiery plume across the sky and something suspiciously body-shaped hits the water not sixty meters from where she’s standing.

“Holy fuck,” she says, and Canadians don’t swear unless it’s the real deal, swear to God.

She pushes her canoe back into the water, grabs a tarp and the first-aid-kit -- trying to remember her wilderness first aid, and all her memory’s giving her is to cover dead bodies with a sheet and treat it like a crime scene -- and paddles over. The body’s floated to the surface, thank goodness. Whoever ejected themselves from that flaming whatever-it-was had a life jacket that inflated on impact, and holy shit on a stick with cheese if that isn’t Captain America face-down in a little piece of Canada.

You don’t go into the woods alone without learning how to pull someone (or yourself) out of the water, but here’s something they don’t teach you in school: that man’s _heavy._ She’ll put a forty kilo canoe on her shoulders no problem but the man’s got sixty more than that on his frame, easy. She rolls him over so he’s face-up, and his eyes are shut, knocked cold, or maybe killed on impact (she tries to avoid the thought, but it pops into her head, regardless); tries to get her arms under his shoulders and hoist him up, but his body’s not getting in her canoe without it tipping. Gotta triage the situation. One in the water is better than two, even if that one is the eighth wonder of the world and probably insured against the gold standard. Does Obama assassinate Canadians for messing with supersoldiers? Does Tony Stark? She whips out her buoyant line, wraps it around him as many times as she can with shaking hands (‘bowline hitch’, she murmurs to herself, over and over), and makes a beeline for shore with her cargo in tow. It’s not an easy paddle, short distance be damned.

“Fucking hell,” she mutters, dragging him onto shore, wary of rocks. As soon as his feet have cleared the lake she rolls him on his back and lets her training take over: his breathing is slow, but deep (is that normal? Does he need as much air as normal folk?); his pulse muted, but strong (does his heart beat as much as a regular person’s?). She swallows hard, glad that she doesn’t have to consider CPR, at least for the moment. All things considered she’s not sure if she’s strong enough to break his ribs. She fusses for a bit about his cuts and scrapes, but as she roots through her first-aid kit for gauze his wounds are already closing up, and isn’t that the creepiest thing she’s seen all week.

So he’s alive, and is probably going to keep kicking for the time being, but she’s got an unconscious soaking-wet supersoldier and they’re at least two days from help. She’d completely jinxed the trip when she’d decided to head out without a satellite phone. Hubris. And she’s getting hungry.

So she does the only thing she can do, drags him a little farther upshore, thinking about that one scene from _The Mazerunner_ (trip’s a good time for catching up on popular novels), and rigs a tarp over him. When he’s dry she wraps him up in a reflective blanket and her sleeping bag -- her bag barely covers him unzipped, but can Cap even get hypothermia? -- and pokes at the fire. Boils a pot of water. Thinks twice about it, then shrugs her shoulders and throws the emergency portion in with the regular portion. Maybe he’ll wake up hungry, and if Stark pops out in the sky all _Hunger Games_ for him she can always eat the extra mac and cheese in the morning.

She’s just finishing eating and the chapter she’s on when she suddenly becomes cognisant of a presence next to her. Wouldn’t you know, he’s awake, staring mildly at the cover on her book.

“Uh,” she says. “This isn’t what it looks like.” Of course she’d be reading _Fifty Shades Freed_. Puts down the book in a hurry. “You, um --”

“-- I was ejected from my plane after taking out whoever sabotaged the engine, that I remember.” He taps his left ear, frowns at the screech of feedback, then takes out his earpiece, gingerly, tucks it in a pocket. “Where exactly am I?”

“Big Trout Lake, Algonquin Provincial Park, um, south end of Ontario, Canada. That a satellite earpiece? Satellite reception is come and go up here. One place Stark still hasn’t gotten to. -- Oh, shit, I’m sorry.”

He smiles, and hell if he isn’t handsome to look at. Really long eyelashes. She’d always assumed they photoshopped him on magazine covers. “It’s true what they say about Canadians, isn’t it! And it’s true what you say about Stark.” He extends a hand. “Steve Rogers. You’re not going to finish that, are you?”

He’s gesturing towards the pot, still half-full. Maybe she’d made too much in case something like this happened. She wipes her mouth with the back of an arm, hands him the bowl and spoon. They stare at the exchange -- an outstretched hand, an offered bowl -- for a few beats too many, and she snorts. Puts the bowl down and shakes his hand.

“Samantha,” she says. “Sam’s fine. Sorry about, um, all of this.” She gestures to herself, a little dirty and banged up after two days on trip. “I don’t normally get company out here.”

“Think I might stick with Samantha, if that’s okay. And I get it.” He picks up the spoon and digs in, and fucking hell, Steve Rogers is eating her macaroni and cheddar straight from the pot like some sort of regular twenty-something hungry after a long day of work. Pausing every now and then to toss a few sticks in the fire. Shouldn’t he be eating kale chips and soylent green? Some kind of super-ambrosia? She sits back on a fallen tree under a steadily darkening sky and watches him, a hundred thousand questions on her tongue: _Do you mind all the attention? Do you ever sit there in your skivvies, watching Netflix and feeling alone? Did you see my grandpa at Ortona?_

“You come here often?” slips out, and goddamn it she wants to shove her foot right in her mouth for that one. “Uh, I mean --”

“Not to Canada, no.” He’s smiling. “At least, not long enough to appreciate it. Where did you say we were?”

Something about his manner sets her at ease. Is it the soldier in him, or the man sixty years out of date? There’s a sadness to him that she’d never picked up on in staged interviews or photo ops. “Algonquin Provincial Park. ‘Bout a three-hour drive north of Toronto. Um, at least, the access point is a three-hour drive from Toronto, and we’re at least two days into the interior by canoe.”

He pushes himself away from the pot, sits next to her. “No way out but by canoe, huh?”

“Well, if we paddle out into the middle of the lake, you might get some reception. It’s spotty, but it works. -- Some people bring sat phones, you know, for emergencies. And the lake’s big enough to land whatever Stark sends to pick you up.” She clears her throat. “Just, ah, maybe ask him if he can make it -- not too big? Big wakes ruin the, um, coastline, where the loons nest.”

It’s a ridiculous request, she knows, but sometimes she feels like this is the last place in the world guys like him haven’t gotten their hands all over, and maybe she’s holding out hope that Steve is, under all the hype, an understanding kind of guy.

To her surprise, he laughs -- a full-on, stomach-hurts kind of laugh. Wipes a tear from his eye. She didn’t know he had tear ducts, always kind of assumed they took them out when they set out to make the perfect soldier. She looks down at her clasped hands. “Tony’s not nearly as important as you think he is,” he says. “I have a different group of people looking after me.”

“Oh.” She coughs to fill space. “I mean, I always assumed, you know, big tower with ‘Stark’ in huge letters…”

“It’s, ah, a bit more complicated than that.” He flashes a smile. “In return for dinner, would you show me how to wash your dishes?”

She does, and shows him how to hitch a bear hang and safely put out a fire and dig a cat hole and set up a tarp with one rope and several judiciously placed trucker’s hitches, a place to toss all the equipment that would otherwise clutter up the tent. He’s generous with his questions. Makes her miss working at summer camps. Under all the pomp and circumstance he’s pretty fun to chat with -- pretty sparse with the details about his own life, but whatever, maybe people don’t like to talk about how they had to beat up some aliens a week after they get woken up in a future they weren’t sure they liked. The sun sets, a little less glorious than she would have liked, but hell, any gradient that goes from blue to pink is worth it.

“Do you miss it?” she asks, as they push the canoe back into the water under the moon.

“Hm? Miss what? I don’t miss whatever briefing about my sudden AWOL I’m surely absent for, if that’s what you mean.”

“The past. Your home.” She read this article once, when she was depressed and lonely, about solastalgia: the world changing without you changing. Distress caused by a thing you called home that will never be what you need it to be ever again. Everyone deals with it differently. “We must seem pretty pathetic to you nowadays, after what you grew up through.”

“Well, back in my day the thought of a young woman going off into the woods by herself would have been cause for a scandal, so I think this is all right.”

Nostalgia can be softened by a return. Solastalgia implies that there is nowhere to return to. “I guess so.”

They paddle out into the middle of the lake, him in the bow seat with her spare paddle, her at the stern. It’s high season for meteor showers -- the Milky Way is like a thumb dipped in green paint and brushed across the sky, dotted with the occasional flash of light. A bat disturbs the peace, only a little. It’s all right; she forgives it, since it’s probably out and about eating mosquitos.

Steve’s earpiece crackles to life in his pocket and he pulls it out. She watches the broad shape of his back as he has a whispered conversation with whoever’s on the other side (not Stark, she thinks, almost chuckling). He turns to her.

“Would you like a lift out?”

“Sorry?”

“There’s room for two, and all your gear, in the ship they’re sending for me. If you’d like a lift out. My friends would like to take you to dinner tomorrow night as compensation for saving my butt.”

“Oh.” Dinner does sound nice -- but long weekends don’t come nearly often enough. “Um, if it’s okay, I’d like to get out my own way. Can we do dinner some other time?”

He smiles, and shit, she feels sorry for every sorry excuse of an idiot who ever crossed him. They paddle back to site and he refuses her tent, says he’ll stay up for a few more hours to watch the sky. Doesn’t need to sleep much. Doesn’t get hypothermia, either.

In the morning he’s gone, no sign that he had crash-landed in the lake at all. You meet strangers in the woods, and _hello_ and _goodbye_ often come on the same breath. And the only way to move is forward.

**Author's Note:**

> i offer no excuses for this fic other than that i really wanted to write it. i'd like to give a big ol' shout-out to the me in 2005 who swore she would never write a self-insert again.
> 
> suck it, past me
> 
> (you can also find me on [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com/))


End file.
